Cecil Buller (1886-1973): A Retrospective

From April 21 to June 12, Cecil Buller (1886-1973): A Retrospective will present some fifty works spanning the long career of this award-winning printmaker, illustrator, designer, watercolourist and painter. This exhibition, organized by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, will be the largest ever devoted to the artist in her native Montreal. The works in the exhibition come from the National Art Gallery and the Carleton University, Ottawa, from the collection Dr Sean Murphy and from the collection of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

The daughter of Dr. Frank Buller, a prominent ophthalmologist, and Elizabeth Langlois of Quebec City, Cecil Buller first studied art with William Brymner at the Art Association of Montreal (forerunner of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts) and later at the Art Student’s League in New York. In 1912, she travelled to Paris with Edwin Holgate and studied under Maurice Denis. The years in Paris profoundly affected her stylistic development. Denis and his contemporaries, Félix Vallotton and Émile Bernard, were at the forefront of the revival of woodblock printing. Influenced by Gauguin, they composed their works with broad, flat fields of colour and figures defined by strong linear contours, emphasizing both psychological states and sensuousness of pattern. Buller’s earliest prints from this period, which are linocuts, reflect the influence of these artists as well as that of Cézanne. In 1916, she went to study in London with the influential printmaker Noël Rooke and there met her future husband, the artist John Murphy. During this period, she experimented with intaglio prints.

On returning to North America, despite periodic visits to Montreal, she settled with her husband in New York in 1918. There she earned a considerable reputation for her wood engravings, a technique she adopted in 1922 that dominated her subsequent work, although she made successful forays into lithography, especially in the 1930s. Cubism also became part of her distinctive style in the 1920s, so that in her woodcuts the figures, often nudes, simplified and structured into block-like sculptural forms, aggressively project themselves in dynamic movement on the page. Texture and tone are created with assertive cross-hatching. During the 1920s and 1930s, she exhibited with leading American printmakers in New York. A remarkable series of illustrations created in 1929 for the "Song of Songs" will be featured in the exhibition. Cecil Buller could work in a more conventional yet equally sophisticated Art-Deco mode in fashion drawings, and was also a talented landscape painter and watercolourist.

Travel in the 1930s to Europe, where her son Sean was enrolled in school, reinvigorated her appreciation of classical subjects. The exhibition includes preparatory drawings from this period for an unfinished project illustrating Phèdre. In the 1940s, she continued to work in a variety of techniques, sometimes on a large scale, and the influences of Surrealism and Expressionism are evident in this later work. Paintings and drawings from throughout her career and representing the diversity of her activities will complement the broad selection of prints presented.

Hilliard T. Goldfarb, Associate chief curator and curator of Old Masters, The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, is the curator of the exhibition Cecil Buller (1886-1973): A Retrospective.